Are Your Postpartum Nightmares Normal?

People throw around the phrase, “It was a total nightmare,”
all the time to describe things like the long lines at Wal-Mart or a bad
pedicure. Sure, I’m as guilty of the hyperbole as the next person, but now that
I’ve had a string of nightmares about my daughter’s safety, I’m not going to
use those words without thinking twice.

Dreams are weird, and sometimes when you tell them to people
in the waking world, they just sound so ridiculous. Believe me, I understand
how dumb these sound in the daylight, but you have to understand how
unbelievably terrifying they were at the time.

In my dream, NASA decided they had to shoot my baby
girl into space in a capsule. If she was lucky, it would rendezvous correctly
with the space station. But if any calculations were wrong, she would spin out
of orbit and float out into space to eventually perish from lack of oxygen.

If you've see "The Martian" or "Interstellar," the
stakes were that high. It was going to be a difficult maneuver. I woke up
before NASA told me whether she’d made it or not.

Real life nightmare fuel: My husband and I went to DC and visited the Air and Space Museum. We
bought Alyssa a little space suit as a souvenir.

(Some) nightmares are the mental scars of deep trauma, and moms
who have them or any symptoms of PTSD should most definitely seek help.

Mama Jailbird

In nightmare No. 2, I was in trouble. I’d gotten arrested for
something really bad, and I was going to jail for a long time. I remember
sitting there in the jail waiting room holding my daughter and kissing her
sweet little blonde head over and over again. I knew it would be a long, long
time before I’d see her again. I woke up crying.

Real life nightmare fuel: Too much "Orange Is the New Black."

Striped Terror

I was substitute teaching at a different school that had a
beach near the playground. The students and I were out there for recess when I
saw a tiger swimming in the water. In dream logic, I knew it had escaped from
the nearby zoo. It was swimming right for a cluster of children playing in the
water and started pulling them down. In a moment of pure horror, I saw my
daughter in the water with floaties on, and then the tiger pulled her under.

Many mamas are dying to know if things about our pregnancies
or child-rearing experiences are normal. So how normal are nightmares about the
safety of our babies? Dreams are often manifestations of our deepest feelings,
and I do spend a good chunk of my day worrying about my daughter getting hurt
or stolen from me by bad guys. This maternal instinct is deep within all
mothers, and it serves an evolutionary purpose. It turns out postpartum
nightmares are pretty normal (along with daymares,
which I didn’t even know were a thing!)

Yes, it turns out that many mothers who endure a traumatic
birth experience, or whose children need serious care in the NICU, are prone to
developing the same type of PTSD that plagues combat veterans. Symptoms can
include paranoia, insomnia, flashbacks, and, yes, nightmares. PTSD nightmares
tend to center
around the trauma itself, forcing the sufferer to relive the experience in
various ways.

These types of dreams are not the normal course for new
mothers and go way beyond the postpartum nightmares brought on by hormones and
a wacky sleep schedule (or my neurotic parent anxiety dreams about my
10-month-old). These nightmares are the mental scars of deep trauma, and moms
who have them or any symptoms of PTSD should most definitely seek help.

Moms, when we got pregnant, we knew our sleep would be
sacrificed in return for the joys of parenthood. And even after Baby starts
sleeping through the night, many of us will suffer the occasional nightmare.
They may not stop until our kids are well out of high school! However,
PTSD-related dreams of relived trauma are nothing to shrug off, and if you
think you’re struggling with a traumatic birth experience, please contact a
professional. Sleep tight, mommies!